Retail giant Walmart has announced that hundreds of its stores will begin selling the iPad on Friday, October 15th. This number will eventually expand to 2,300 stores throughout November.

Per Electronista, Walmart revealed the news Monday evening, confirming last week’s rumor that the Bentonville, Arkansas mega-retailer would start carrying Apple’s iPad this week. The chain’s stores will offer all six models of the tablet device.

The iPad can be ordered online from the Walmart web site but must be picked up in store. Retail stores will feature the device as part of a “separate showcase of Apple hardware,” the report noted.

According to sources, some Walmart stores have already placed the iPad on the shelves alongside Apple’s iPods in advance of Friday’s official launch.

If you’ve seen the iPad at your local Walmart prior to the Friday launch, let us know.

There’s some nifty stuff en route for the fifth generation iPhone, even if it doesn’t encapsulate everything at once.

Per TechCrunch. the upcoming iPhone will be capable of running on networks based on both of the world’s most popular 3G wireless standards but will forgo support for the faster 4G networks that are just now coming online.

Following rumors up to 11 months old, the article claims that Apple’s next major iPhone revision will run on both GSM and CDMA networks (presumably via a dual-mode Qualcomm baseband chip) but won’t support the next-generation of faster, Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, more communally referred to as 4G networks.

The handset will reportedly take a less aggressive approach that will see it delay the iPhone’s support of 4G networks until some time in 2012, allowing it to bypass the first generation of power-hungry and potentially problematic LTE baseband controllers in favor of boosting its efforts around proprietary technologies like FaceTime.

Such an approach would be in the vein of more traditional efforts such as the launch of the original iPhone, which only supported AT&T’s robust 2.5G EDGE network despite broad availability of the faster 3G technology around the same time.

“Apple simply doesn’t want to be the guinea pig on new LTE networks that aren’t ready for primetime, and Steve Jobs knows not to trust the hype that’s spewed by the carriers on 4G,” the report says. “The truth is that 3G networks have many more years of life, and the transition to LTE will be much slower than the carriers want you to believe (LTE doesn’t even have its voice standard fleshed out yet).”

It’s for these reasons, the report adds, that AT&T has been upgrading its network for broader support of the faster HSPA+ (or the so-called 3.5G) standard while Verizon has been working to implement an enhancement to the CDMA standard that will let future devices transmit both data and voice communications simultaneously.